The Sarofim School of Fine Arts Gallery is thrilled to present State Lines exhibition from September 20-November 12.

Megaphone Feature Story

 

Southwestern University’s Sarofim Gallery presents an art exhibition, State Lines, featuring four artists who address challenges of interpersonal identity. Appropriating colloquial materials and mythologies, each of the artists combines personal contexts with strong associations to Texas and the visual language of modernism. State Lines is curated by Hilary Hunt and Arturo Palacios ’97 of DEASIL (Houston, TX,) who offer works by The Bridge Club, Buster Graybill, Liss LaFleur, and Ana Fernandez.

 

The curators chose State Lines as a play on words “not limited to geographic boundaries, but focused on the frontiers of selfdom. Like its geopolitical homonym, a cognitive ‘state line’ can be fuzzy, arbitrary, obsolete, or guarded; it can represent a dissonance or an harmonic fluidity. This exhibition brings together works from artists who straddle, subvert, and stretch the historical and cultural signifiers attached to heritage, gender, sexuality, and geography.”

 

The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and art performance collaborative consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of the Bridge Club’s works, including interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience, and investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts.

 

Buster Graybill utilizes sculpture, installation, video, performance, and photography to traverse and reconnect with the fringe areas where culture, nature, objects, and aesthetics co-exist. Graybill harvests memories, stories, language, and objects from rural American culture, creating projects that address how rural landscape and urban sprawl collide, adapt, and overlap. Buster Graybill earned his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and his BFA from the University of North Texas at Denton. He is currently an assistant professor of art at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

 

Liss LaFleur incorporates feminism, body art, and archives to produce digitally fabricated objects as extensions of her body, queering inherited roles tied to female ideologies and the politics of difference. As a queer artist, she challenges a sense of self which is transformative, fluid, and often self-deprecating of her southern roots. Liss Lafleur holds an MFA from Emerson College and a BFA from the University of North Texas. She is currently serving as the assistant professor of New Media Art and Program Coordinator at the University of North Texas.

 

Ana Fernandez creates enigmatic street scenes exploring the diverse landscapes of South Texas Latino communities, capturing the culture, psychology and spirit of specific sights. In this light, a car or a pickup truck can represent aspirations of physical and social mobility, while a neon bridal mannequin becomes a feminine protagonist in a silent film. Fernandez holds a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from UCLA. She is currently completing the Skowhegan Residency and is an upcoming artist-in-residence at ArtPace.

 

DEASIL is Hilary Hunt and Arturo Palacios ’97, working to explore the itinerant possibilities between commercial gallerists, art consultants, and independent curators. DEASIL offers a nomadic approach to programming that aims to produce exhibitions through the careful consideration of artistic intent, time, and unique location. Deasil means clockwise, dexterous, to follow the course of the sun, and to “move deasil” is considered lucky.

 

The Sarofim Fine Arts Gallery hours are 12:00-5:00 p.m., closed Mondays and holidays. This exhibition will be on view from September 20–November 12 , 2018.

 

 This exhibit is made possible by the generous philanthropic support of Lynn Parr Mock ’83 and Presley M. Mock ’82.